


The Good Place

by beetle



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/F, post-nfa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:32:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immediately post-NFA. Written for the slashthedrabble prompt #181, "questions."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Place

**Author's Note:**

> Notes/Warnings: Set Post-NFA. Vague spoilers for S5. Dark. Mentions of character death.

Time is stale taffy: stretching, and crumbling as it stretches. Breaking into chunks and slivers.

 

In the days since she stumbled out of Wolfram & Hart, it's become hard to tell when night begins and day ends, but that the vampires become bolder in the former, the screams louder and more desperate.

 

The City of Angels is no longer that. It is dying, but its body doesn't seem to know that. Doesn't seem to notice it's not as immortal as it once was.

 

She can empathize. She hasn't eaten for at least a week (there her frame for reference had ended, since the vampire that scorned her blood had knocked her out and taken her Rolex, instead) but her body, though not growing stronger, also isn't very much weaker.

*

 

Her aimless feet carry her to the Hyperion, in some vague cross-association that here, at this place, was salvation, and hope . . . of a kind.

 

But all she finds is rubble, surrounding a tumbled foundation. The carcasses of  _things_  that would have shocked her once, but not now. The carcasses of  _people_  . . . which no longer send tremors of despair throughout her body.

 

Here, she can't remember her name. The screams don't matter as much. Even the ones in her own head have fallen silent.

 

It's customary to be silent and respectful in a graveyard, and Southern California is the largest graveyard in recorded history. Even memories can't touch her, here.

 

Emptied, she lingers. This is a good place.

*

 

Nothing bothers her here, day or night, or in the murky half-light that is all times. Nothing.

 

Not even finding the half-eaten corpse of Charles Gunn, mostly buried under a massive girder.

*

 

“We must go.”

 

She's been here forever. Has discarded memories of a life other than this limbo of corpses and stone. Of fetid, reeking air that burns lungs and skin. Of silence, now that the vampires and demons have moved on to redder pastures.

 

Except for this one, this . . .  _thing_.

 

It was blue at first, like a walking, impossible chunk of firmament. Then it was brown: eyes, hair, cotton sundress that lifts in the sulfuric zephyrs to show flashes of pretty, coltish legs.

 

“The power of the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart is fading from this place. You fade with it, and will soon join the dead, singing the Song of the Grey.”

 

It talks funny. Or rather it  _doesn't_.

 

_Your name is Fred. Or it_ would _be if you were Fred, but you aren't. The heroes are all dead._

 

She cringes in on herself: a being of stinking rags and wasted limbs. Of gums drawn back from mossy teeth, rashes caused by airborne irritants, and stringy hair that's mostly fallen out.

 

A hard, too-hot hand hauls her to her feet by one scrawny bicep.

 

“We must go,” Not-Fred says again, dropping her arm and turning away.

 

She sways, but doesn't crumple. “Go where?”

 

Not-Fred doesn't answer, only starts walking.

 

She. . . .

 

. . . follows. It's the only answer left for her.


End file.
